Today’s Photo

Whenever the weather becomes too much to bear (hot or cold) I usually look for shooting opportunities around the house. With temperatures hovering around 100F this week I decided to continue to refine my indoor HDR skills using part of my living room as the subject. High Dynamic Range or HDR photography is a methodology to overcome the limited, five stop exposure range of today’s digital sensors. This technique involves the use of specialized software to combine the best exposed parts of multiple exposures to span a range closer to what the human eye actually perceives. In this case I used Photoshop CS5 software and six exposures covering about eight stops to produce the image above. The lighting was entirely natural from the sunlit backyard through the living room windows. The HDR image was post-processed in Lightroom to get reasonable balance between the outdoor scene and the much darker indoor part of the image. My ultimate objective is to move on to something more grand, maybe the interior of a cathedral. We’ll see what the weather brings.